1. Technical Field
The invention relates generally to the operation of an online service or website that helps in establishing scientific collaboration between users interested in studying rare diseases, and more specifically to a matching system designed to find users who have patients that share similar lists of symptoms under their care.
2. Description of Related Art
According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH)'s Genetic and Rare Diseases Information Center (GARD), there are more than 7,000 rare diseases. A disease is considered rare if fewer than 200,000 people in the United States have it. About 25 million Americans have a rare disease. Many rare diseases are caused by changes in genes and are called “genetic diseases”.
Physicians will sometimes say that a child has an “undiagnosed rare condition” or an “undiagnosed genetic condition” when they are unable to find a diagnosis for certain characteristics or symptoms. In fact, finding an underlying diagnosis for many conditions can be a very long and frustrating experience. A diagnosis can take as many as five years, and occasionally may never happen, especially with rare conditions.
This can be very difficult for parents, who sometimes want to know if their child should be evaluated by a rare disease specialist. Unfortunately, because there usually are so few cases of specific rare diseases, there is often not a doctor who has seen many (or any) similar cases. For this reason, it may take a doctor a long time to match symptoms to a possible diagnosis.
Although there has been great progress in the Clinical Genetics field in recent years, rare cases often end up in careful clinical case and family history descriptions, and physical exam, looking at the standard laboratory data and trying to put all clinical features together to come up with some sort of diagnostic probability. Even after a battery of standard genetic screenings, 30 to 40 percent of patients with morphological abnormalities, for example, do not have a precise diagnosis.
Detailed genetic analyses and studies are hardly ever undertaken on such rare cases unless patients with similar symptoms can be identified and scientists with related projects can collaborate with each other. In addition, clinical and molecular information on rare diseases are spread out in the literature and all over the internet, in a plethora of public and private websites, making difficult for medical and healthcare professionals to quickly translate the latest advances into effective clinical intervention.
Currently existing online health information portals provide health information services to consumers, physicians, healthcare professionals, employers, and health plans. However, they only cover a group of well-known genetic diseases. Public, government, not-for-profit, and non-commercial websites and databases that provide medical and health information are usually diverse and rich in content but offer a very limited degree of interaction for their users to exchange information. Online medical communities allow professionals to discuss medications and procedures, exchange ideas and seek for information about treatments, and collaborate in clinical cases. However, discussion forums and groups are often limited to text messaging and chat rooms making it difficult to follow them as they grow in number of participants and posted comments.
Thus, there is a need for an online service, website or portal which allows physicians, allied health personnel, and scientists interested in rare diseases to find patients sharing similar symptoms and colleagues with whom they might collaborate and/or share information on related projects. It is also desirable that this same website provides complementary services that include, for example, access to a database containing clinical and molecular information about rare diseases.